Civil Procedure exam questions from Michael S. Green's course at William and Mary, with occasional posts on other teaching and research

Conflict of Laws

This article is one salvo in a comprehensive attack on interest analysis - the dominant choice-of-law approach in the United States. It took a while to see the light of day, but it is finally coming out from the Georgia Law Review.

...have now been posted. The fact that so many of those who choose to take this course are exceptional students always makes assigning grades within the confines of the mandatory curve a problem. My goal of keeping the number of lower grades to a minimum meant that I gave out fewer As and A-s than I might otherwise have done.

I just found out that Alfred Hill, a professor of law at Columbia, died a few months ago. My initial exposure to Hill’s work on Erie was curious. In looking at current articles on the topic, I kept seeing citations to articles Hill wrote in the 1950s: State Procedural Law in Federal Nondiversity Litigation and The Erie Doctrine in Bankruptcy, both published in the Harvard Law Review, and a two-part article in the Northwestern University Law Review called The Erie Doctrineand the Constitution. Citation to half-century-old articles is very unusual in legal scholarship. When I took a look at them, I found out why they were so popular. They were masterful — written with a clarity and insight that made them still useful today. Indeed, I still often find that a Hill article is the only one that discusses a problem I am interested in. I then discovered that Hill, who I had assumed died decades before, was still alive. A number of times I considered emailing him to let him know how much I thought of his work. I never did and now, I’m sorry to hear, it is too late.

Just posted a new paper on SSRN. I argue for the following limit on states' power to regulate the procedure of federal courts: Their power cannot be vertical. They cannot direct their law solely to federal courts within their borders. This may not seem that significant, but it is surprising how often law professors and federal judges have assumed that vertical power exists. They're wrong.

I've posted the grades for Conflicts. It was a good set of exams. In particular, there was no exam I could feel comfortable giving a B- or lower, so I jiggered the grades to avoid that and still stay (barely) within the mandatory curve range...

I thought I would say a bit more about my (partial) critique of Larry Kramer’s solution to the problem of unprovided-for cases, which I discussed in class. An unprovided-for case is one in which it looks as if neither state is interested in its law applying. An example is Neumeier. An Ontarioan, who was a guest in a New Yorker’s car, sues the New Yorker in New York state court for negligence in connection with an accident in Ontario. Ontario has a guest statute, which bars a guest from suing a host for negligence. New York doesn’t.

In his article defending Erie, Ernest Young questions my conclusion (in Erie’s Suppressed Premise) that Georgia is still committed to a Swiftian view of the common law. Since I spoke about Georgia’s Swiftian approach in class in Conflicts, this also is an opportunity say a bit more about the topic for my students.